The importance of online advertising has increased tremendously as Internet use has become an integral part of daily life for many people. Revenue from providing online advertisements and sales that result from online advertisements now account for a large portion of the revenue earned by many companies. Advertisers have conventionally negotiated a per-impression price with publishers for displaying a fixed number of individual advertisement impressions. The fixed number of impressions are then displayed on web pages for an agreed-upon time period.
This established paradigm is shifting. Some publishers have begun to sell individual advertisement impressions through a real-time bidding process. The real-time bidding process is inherently incompatible with the idea of reserving impressions for particular clients in advance. Publishers are faced with the dilemma of continuing to provide traditional reserved contracts to existing clients while attempting to accommodate interest in real-time bidding.